Showing posts with label essay. Show all posts
Showing posts with label essay. Show all posts

4.5.22

Photo Gallery & Story: Em and Orange and the Rubik's Cube

In this post, I tell an imaginative story about two boys and a Rubik's Cub.
Two boys hold their respective Rubik's cubes.
       Once upon a time there were two boys, one from the east side of the railroad tracks and one from the west side. Though they were born in different worlds, fate had other plans for them. The boy from the east was named Orange, a bright and ambitious young man with dreams of being an engineer someday. He worked hard to make his parents proud, but he still felt like something was missing in his life. On the other side of town was another boy named Em, who lived on the west side of town near where the railroad tracks ended at a small station house. Em grew up without much money or resources, but he did have big dreams, too; he wanted to become a famous musician one day. One day, after school let out for summer break, Orange decided to take an adventurous journey down the railroad tracks that divided their towns' east and west sides. As fate would have it, Em happened to be walking along that same section of track when Orange came across him by chance. After introducing themselves, they quickly became friends despite coming from two very different backgrounds — both offering knowledge and guidance and sharing stories about living life on their own terms despite all odds stacked against him.
     Together they explored each others' worlds as if no boundaries existed between them — exploring neighborhoods on either side of town together and sharing music, which brought joyous laughter throughout their days spent together until eventually, it seemed as if no separation between them ever really existed at all!
Orange and Em had a love for the Rubik's cube. They would spend endless hours searching for different kids at the dollar store. On lazy Saturdays, following the train tracks to the end of town, near an old lake, with a browned-out beach, they would try to solve the cubes. Orange and Em were determined to master the cube and use it as an opportunity to learn more about each other and bridge any gaps between them. As they work together, both of them discover that there is much more that unites them than divides them.
The Rubik's Cube has been a popular and beloved puzzle since it was first invented by Hungarian sculptor and professor Ernö Rubik in 1974. Since then, the cube has become even more popular, with over 350 million units sold worldwide. The cube is thought to be the best-selling toy of all time. Its unique combination of colors, shapes, and difficulty levels is believed to be responsible for its continued success today. The history of the Rubik's Cube includes some fascinating scientific developments that make this classic puzzle one of the most challenging puzzles ever created!
Some people find this puzzle challenging due to its complexity, as it often involves solving multiple steps or components to arrive at the correct answer. Others may have more experience with puzzles of this type and can quickly recognize patterns and apply strategies that help them solve the problem. Additionally, some individuals may possess innate intellectual abilities which allow them to intuitively identify solutions that others may not think of.
Solving a Rubik's cube requires combining cognitive skills, including spatial awareness and pattern recognition. While some individuals may have an innate aptitude for these abilities, scientific theories suggest that other factors, such as practice, experience, and focus can also affect the ability to solve a Rubik's cube. Research has found that people with higher levels of abstract thinking are more capable of understanding the patterns involved in solving a Rubik's cube. Additionally, problem-solving strategies play an essential role in improving performance on this task; however, different techniques work better for specific individuals depending on their particular skill set. Ultimately, it is likely that there is no single answer to what makes solving a Rubik's cube easier or more challenging - instead it depends heavily upon the individual's unique mix of cognitive skills and strategies when approaching the puzzle.
So, when Orange and Em, two boys who learned to take on the same challenge in different ways, a lesson was learned. Em approaches the cube with determination, methodically studying each piece and trying to fit them together as quickly as possible. His fast-paced approach leads to some initial success, but eventually he gets stuck - unable to move any further forward or backward. Orange takes a slower, more creative approach, viewing the cube from different angles and experimenting with unique strategies that might work better for him. He starts out slowly but gradually builds momentum until he can see small progress every time he turns it over. In the end, both boys can solve the cube using their own methods - patience combined with creativity enabling them to find success where previously there had been only frustration. 
Through this story, we learn that problem-solving doesn't always have one correct answer - depending on our circumstances and abilities, different approaches may be necessary to achieve our goals.
Having an open mind when approaching any challenge is essential as it allows one to be more creative and think outside the box. An open-minded approach encourages the consideration of multiple perspectives and ideas, which can often lead to innovative solutions that may not have been considered before. Additionally, by being open-minded, we are less likely to become stuck in a rut or fall into tunnel vision, thus allowing us to see opportunities for growth and improvement that otherwise would have remained hidden. Having an open mindset also will enable us to become more adaptable and better equipped for change — essential skills for anyone who wishes to overcome obstacles or achieve success in any field.

9.4.18

Eating Peanut Butter and Onion Sandwiches and the 1989 American Hollywood Film Little Monsters

In 1989, Richard Greenberg, a Hollywood film director, made a movie for Vestron Pictures called Little Monsters. The movie had a limited run in theaters and did not gross over a million dollars in ticket sales even though the picture cost about seven million dollars to make. I am also certain that the producers and writers of this glitzy Hollywood movie had no intention of including gay subtext - but it is still interesting (to me, at least) to peel back a few layers. So permit me to be a little gay and read this movie as a gay love story. As I point out in the following review, the movie is very heterosexual (as most Hollywood movies are) which perhaps makes it even more interesting to think about with a non-heteronormative reading.
I read Little Monsters as a tween same-sex love story

Fred Savage (Kevin Arnold!)
In the 1990s, the movie gained wider distribution on American cable television which is how I most likely saw it for the first time. The movie stars the boyish actor Fred Savage. He plays Brian, a sixth grader who discovers that there are really monsters under his bed. As a kid, I liked the juxtaposition between a monster world and the real world - and I was transfixed by the way in which the film jumped back and forth between a staid Middle America suburban landscape and the carnivalesque world of the monsters.

About twenty years have elapsed since the movie was released; and I'm interested about what Little Monsters was telegraphing about what it means to be male, to be interested in "adult things," but to also remain a kid. It's obvious now - but movies like Little Monsters were remarkably heterosexual. In the film's preamble, Brian sneaks into the kitchen when everyone is asleep to watch (what looks like the Playboy channel) and makes a peanut butter and onion sandwich to eat in front of the TV. 
Brian sneaks into the kitchen in the middle of the night to eat a peanut butter and onion sandwich.
Brian has a thing for peanut butter and onion sandwiches
I suppose the scene sets up Brian's loneliness as a kid (i.e., eating a snack in the middle of the night all by himself) and to highlight his burgeoning curiosity in women (i.e., ogling a female actress wearing a bra). As writers like Jeffery P. Dennis have pointed out, boys going girl crazy at twelve-years-old is a relatively new feature of Hollywood films. It almost feels necessary in a film today - the boy protagonist has to have some younger (or older) female foil - he has to be interested in girls - or so we are led to believe. Just look at any film targeted to younger audiences, even the most family-oriented films like Goonies (which was made in 1985) and you can see this narrative element play itself out - Sean Astin's character Mikey is mistaken in the dark by his older brother's girlfriend and makes out with her off-screen. It's a gag - and it is meant to make viewers laugh - but it also presents Mikey, who is about the same age as Brian - as primed and ready for girl-craziness.

White Middle-Class America
I'm fixated on race in American movies older than twenty years. If I am not mistaken, the only character of color in Little Monsters is a short cameo by Magbee, a black actor, who plays Brian's school bus driver. Brian's classmates are typically middle class, his school is fairly caucasian, and the film's adult characters seem to inhabit the mostly yuppie world the late 80s and early 90s seemed to project - material wealth and strategic brand placement. For example, don't you want to eat a bag of Doritos after watching this movie?

As an adult, it is unsettling for me to watch a movie like Little Monsters, because when I watched it as a kid I was not looking at the film with a critical view. However, looking at it now, I must have been influenced in the way the film shapes a narrative about masculinity. I think it matters to think critically about movies we watched as children because as adults or nostalgia for the films of our youth can cloud our judgment. I'm amazed by how many of my peers who have children love having their kids watch the same movies we grew up with as kids. It's funny how the passage of time makes a Hollywood sacred. What's so great, for example, about Brian?  I certainly was not the same as Brian. But I knew kids like Brian and privately I wanted to be like the Brians of the world. They were not especially academically minded but the Brians of my youth had a masculine charm that Fred Savage was certainly able to market - which is why he has become a teen star icon. 


30.3.18

On Knowing Nothing and Why I am Embarrassed that I am a Know-it-All

My worst trait is that I am a know-it-all. I like to know things, and I feel amiss if I am not the one explaining. It’s an embarrassing trait. But I admit it. Awareness is half the battle, right? I like to know things. I am obsessive that way. 
Dicken's Mr. M'Choakumchild in the Age of No Child Left Behind

© 2000 Hearst Newspapers
Because I am a know-it-all, you’d think I’d be a sore loser. But I am not. I do not like to know stuff, so I can somehow feel superior to others. I just wish to know things and I will gladly listen if you have something new to teach me. 

As a teenager, I would get into bitter arguments with my parents about the minutiae of a such-and-such fact. Is a shark a fish? Why does Louisiana have the Napoleonic code? I think my parents thought I was just being a know-it-all. I am pretty sure my mom thought I was arrogant most of the time. I liked to read, and I wanted to find someone to bounce off ideas. When you're a kid, your audience options are limited.


14.2.12

Reflecting On Despair According to Søren Kierkegaard (and Others)

“Infinitude’s despair, therefore, is the fantastic, the unlimited for the self is healthy and free from despair only when, precisely by having despaired, it rests transparently in God.” — (Søren Kiekegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, pg. 30)

Must we despair in order that we don’t despair? 

     Must we suffer, so as not to suffer? We find ourselves in a paradox, stuck between finitude and infinitude, wanting to die and not wanting to die. Life can be artificial oftentimes — death has already struck us a blow, a death that is more internal and threatens the infinite more than any physical death could. Every day we face ourselves; we face our possibilities, sometimes cringing and other times barely aware that we are sad.
    Søren Kierkegaard experienced despair. The words he writes on the subject reek of subjectivity; you can almost taste-smell-touch Kierkegaard’s despair as you read a work like the Sickness Unto Death.
    Kierkegaard never claims to be someone whose been “transparent before God”; he probably never was “healthy and free” from despair — for he says all of us whether we are Christian or not, have despaired or continue to despair.
    There are probably many events in Kierkegaard’s life that disrupted his own synthesis of infinitude and infinitude.

Kierkegaard's Failed Romance with Regina Olsen
    Kierkegaard fell in love with a young woman named Regina Olsen. There is no doubt that many of the works produced by Kierkegaard were a result of the relationship he had with her.
    They were planning marriage until Kierkegaard decided to end the relationship. It seems when great happiness is evident, or the possibility of happiness is on the horizon, despair settles in deepest. In the Moviegoer Walker Percy’s character Binx Bolling makes that clear in the Moviegoer when he says, “whenever one courts great happiness, one also risks malaise” (121).
    Kierkegaard had straddled that possibility and it made him afraid; he didn’t fall out of love with Regina Olsen (he loved her dearly — till his death). When he broke off the engagement with her he made sure she did not suffer embarrassment. In Kierkegaard's time, if a man breaks off an engagement with a woman, the woman is stigmatized. Kierkegaard prevented that stigma so he forced her to break off the engagement with him. He made sure friends and family saw him as the villain and Regina as the victim. He quit seeing her; he quit sending flowers; he quit courting her.
    Why did he do this? Obviously they would have been happy. What caused him to end such a relationship? Kierkegaard was afraid that if he married Regina Olsen, he would be unable to continue writing — he considered himself unsuited for the married life (Coppleston, Vol. 7, p. 338) — he was a man with goals and ideas and sealing a marriage, he felt, would prevent him from achieving his philosophical goals.
    He alludes to the engagement in his writings; one gets the sense that he regretted his decision — that he gave up on a beautiful thing. He writes of the relationship, pseudonymously, in a wry, novel-like section of Either/Or or also called The Seducer’s Diary.
    A few years before his engagement to Regina Olsen, he seriously considered suicide. Kierkegaard grew up in a strict, religious family. His father was a melancholic, religious man who believed that God’s wrath was imminent. The father’s dire religious overtones hung over the family like a doomsday saying. Kierkegaard's father read to his son stories from the bible from an illustrated tome that depicted graphically the violence of the crucifixion. I think the young Kierkegaard was seared by those images of a brutally beaten Christ hanging on a cross.

The Theme of Despair in the book The Sickness Unto Death
    The central story of Sickness Unto Death is an interpretation of the rising of Lazarus by Christ recounted in Chapter 11 of John's Gospel. Lazarus, the brother of Martha and the Mary who anointed the body of Jesus with oil and dried his feet with her hair, is ill and near death. Kierkegaard reads the story as an explanation of despair. Christ says Lazarus's sickness is not unto death (John 11:4). The disciples misunderstand Jesus to mean physical death, but Jesus means spiritual death, the death caused by despair. Raising Lazarus from the dead is the greatest "sign" Christ performs in John's Gospel. In fact, it is the culmination event of many minor "signs" Jesus performs. Kierkegaard reads the story as an allegory on despair. Raising Lazarus from the dead is meant to serve a point: that death won't kill Lazarus. To raise him from the dead only for him to die, physically later on, is to suggest that Christ has saved him from the death caused by inner despair.
On a Recent Visit to Copenhagen I Visted Kierkegaard
    I wrote on Kierkegaard as an undergraduate philosophy major. I went to Copenhagen to visit his grave, which turned out to be a great pun for in Danish graveyard is "kierkegaard" so when I asked someone where was the grave of Kierkegaard they thought I was asking where was the churchyard. It is fitting that Kierkegaard's name means graveyard.
   On my way to Copenhagen I took a ferry from Germany to Denmark in a train. The train enters the ferry via built-in tracks. It was late at night. I was sitting next to a German girl who was going to Denmark for a summer job. Since we were talking to each other, when the train boarded the ferry, we both went on deck to look out into the sea. I remember looking down into the dark wine waters and feeling vertigo and this sudden desire to plunge into the vortex.
   Perhaps what Kierkegaard was trying to say is that we can die way before our actual deaths. Feeling the vertigo made me feel alive but at the same time hearkened a baleful note to my mortality. I recognized the horrific contingency of my being, that I won't last long. Kierkegaard's point was that we succumb to death long before we physically die in a kind of covering up of our selves. Famously Kierkegaard defines the self as a relation that is in relationship with its own self. Sometimes this relational structure becomes muddled, scratched over, hidden and we become lost to our self. We are unmoored from our relationship to our very self.
    The greatest form of despair is the despair that does not even know it is in despair.
    To know I am in despair is the first step to not be in despair. In other words, to know that I am born, introduced to this world without any instruction, or even with my permission, so I recognize that I am not at home in this world. To be in despair is to kid myself into thinking that I am at home in the world when really I am not.
  Heidegger was influenced by Kierkegaard. What Heidegger has to say about anxiety is closely mirrored to Kierkegaard's theory of the self. Dasein (Heidegger's neologism for the human being, which means literally being-there) is a being whose very being becomes an issue for it. This is very close to what Kierkegaard was trying to say. And I think it is what Walker Percy was trying to say in all of his novels: we are strangers in a strange land.
   That night on the ferry to Denmark I wanted to jump into the void for it promised an escape. Not that I had any external reason to be in despair. At that time in my life, I was feeling pretty good. But the recognition came to me that what defines the human being is despair.
The Mass of Men Leads Lives of Quiet Desperation
   I think it was Thoreau who said the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. I think he was onto something. And so was I at that moment. Since then I have forgotten. Only to find my notes on Kierkegaard in a notebook from my college days which I reconstructed to write this blog post. The me of 2000 when I was 20 is sending a message to me of 2012 at 32. I think that is how it works. There is no essential self. Just fragments. Thank god we can communicate.

24.7.11

Repost: The Relationship of Truth and Relativism by Marian Larman, O.S.B.

I came across this essay in my personal files. It is written by Marian Larman, a Benedictine priest who taught philosophy. This essay has a personal import for me. Larman wrote it during the last year of his life. He had retired as pastor of a small church in Saint Benedict, Louisiana. Because of declining health, he moved into the infirmary at the monastery where I was a monk. On some mornings I would visit the infirmary. Two parakeets inhabited a birdcage in the solarium, a rectangular room that allowed in plenty of sunlight. Father Marian would sit in the solarium reading a newspaper or a newly acquired book on Saint Thomas Aquinas. While an ardent Thomist, he did not hold to the belief that there we through faith we have access to an overarching truth. There may be an absolute truth but finite beings are limited to what we can know. We would have quiet conversations sometimes. I mainly listened as he told me about his ideas. Father Augustine, who took care of the infirmary allowed Father Marian to write in the infirmary. He acquired a small manual typewriter on which he wrote the following essay. While he equates truth to adequation in the following piece, a position I find difficult to swallow, since I have difficulty with the concept of absolute truth (especially in regards to theology), the following essay is a fine example of a Thomist attempting to square his views with relativism and the charge that all is merely subjective and everyone has their own version of truth (or, the verso, all is objective and all there is absolute truth). I have simply typed his essay as it appeared in the typewritten manuscript.

18.12.10

On Wonder

 An essay by Greig Roselli reprinted from Canon Magazine

In the Theatetus Plato writes, “philosophy begins in wonder” (155d). The Greek is θαῦμα which translates as “puzzle,” “problem,” or simply, a “marvel”. The definition suggests to wonder is “to solve a conundrum.” In this sense, θαῦμα carries with it an active puzzle-solving. Wonder is open to activity but is also somehow passive in its reflection. I say this because to wonder means both to reflect, to bring a thought into motion, and also, the active thinking of the thought, which we call roughly, the idea. The quip, then, “Philosophy begins in wonder,” seems to suggest a something that originates in a person who wonders, like the birth of an idea, and rises to the surface  call it consciousness, and it is there, an eureka moment, “ah ha!” I got it! Archimedes sat in his tub, noticed that the water level rose equal to the volume of his own body. Before Archimedes’s discovery, an object’s displacement of water was a mystery, something to be puzzled out. Is wonder then what allows us to rise above Baudelaire’s animal who is stupid in his sleep? Wonder, then, is the origin of an eureka moment. Isn’t this what we do when we attempt to puzzle out questions of being?
Archimedes in the bathtub, "Eureka!" image credit:strongnet

9.10.10

Book Review: Virginia Woolf as Philosopher for the People

Three Guineas Journal
In this post, I offer a review of Virginia Woolf’s searing report on the devastating effects of war. It's her most articulate contribution to the history of ideas because it articulates quite well, and cogently – in the manner of classical rhetoric  ideas about pacifism, women, and war. Having lived through the First World War, Woolf dreads the possibility of another one to come . . .
     
Three Guineas is a bitter discourse on the prevention of war, and defense of philanthropy, and women; it is also an attack on the growing hegemonic power afloat in Europe before the Second World War; it is an older and hardened view, distinct from the more playful A Room of One’s Own she had written earlier, which is more about the sexuality of women, the spirit of women. However, it touches on some of the issues she expounds upon in Three Guineas. In a way, it is like a sequel; actually, I think this is how Woolf intended it. Three Guineas comes out of the work she did on The Years, her most famous novel, about the Pargiter family, their history from the 19th century to Woolf’s present day.
      Woolf published the book Three Guineas out of her own Hogarth press. I wonder how many people actually “got it” or even took the time to read the book? I wonder how many people actually read A Room of One’s Own and “got it”? The slim volume deserves a second look. I think Woolf is important to intellectual thought. Woolf is part of what I call intellectual talk within intellectual circles and also, by her own admission, critical to the public sphere of intellectualism. Woolf attempts to speak to everyman. She is a philosopher for the people. Three Guineas is filled with harsh condemnations. She accuses society of having an infantile fixation (134-135); of the widening gap between the public and private sectors and the use of clothing to deceive young men into joining the war effort (14). I find Woolf to be candid in this book. I think she states some hard arguments. The difficulty of the book is following Woolf’s train of thought; Woolf reads like an autodidact, which she was, and her arguments sometimes feel more passionate than systematically thought out; but, I reason, she has spent so much time, energy and words on these issues; I feel ill at ease following her passion because I sense she doesn’t have to convince me; I know she must be right!
     One significant contribution she gives in this work is that she nuances the stance of feminism. Feminist thought is not dead even though women can now vote and work, Woolf argues. We can’t stop now as if everything is equal and normal for women. As if women and men are the same. There will still be Creons abusing Antigones. But, Woolf is not fatalistic. She does see that something must be done. There is a web site I found about an organization founded in 1993 called the Three Guineas Organization. It helps women and girls through education, similar to the groups that were writing to Woolf asking for aid.
     I say Three Guineas is a bitter discourse because it is written not as a romp through Oxford and the British Library, but an attempt to ask the hard questions and a realization of forces greater than our control. Woolf intuits the horror of the World War and the seeming repetition of war, the misuse of women throughout history; “Things repeat themselves it seems. Pictures and voices are the same today as they were 2,000 years ago” (141). I think she sees Hitler and Fascism for what it really was: not for true freedom and liberty but rather threatening to Western Civilization. Of course, war is threatening. But she asks: how does war deplete society? Why are women asking for money? How does war take away resources, thus eroding the cornerstone of liberal arts education, the workforce, and liberty in general? Why are these three different organizations, even asking for money in the first place? Will a guinea also help them? Shouldn’t society be asking why they must plead for money in the first place? Why are the administrators of a woman’s college living under deplorable conditions, begging? In a letter to Woolf, an accountant for the college asks, “Will you send a subscription to [our society] in order to help us to earn our living? Failing money … any gift will be acceptable – books, fruit, or cast-off clothing that can be sold in a bazaar (41)”.
     Woolf wants to know why is this school asking for money? Haven’t women been liberated for the past twenty years? She includes a response to such a request for a subscription, asking, “How can it be, we repeat? Surely there must be some very grave defect, of common humanity, of common justice, or of common sense” (41-42).
     I noticed in this book that Woolf is aware of the influence of photography (at least 11 and 142). She writes about the horrors of war recorded by the camera. This book is timely today because we can trace how the influence of the camera has made an arc to the television set, to the Internet. We are inundated with images that dictate how we are supposed to look at the world. I love how she is so contemporary with this issue.
What is the meaning of these words that we are willing to die to defend? Freedom? Liberty? Rights of Man?
      She lambasts an army general’s debonair suit by pointing out that in battle, soldiers do not wear finery. Woolf concludes that the regalia of uniforms is a lure to get young men to join the military. The suit does not tell the truth; uniforms are deceptive instruments to get people in the ranks, to fight the countries wars.
      Also, isn’t it interesting that Woolf questions giving the money to these different organizations? She challenges us to look at things from all the different points of view, preferably three. She has three newspapers on her desk. “Therefore if you want to know any facts about politics you must read at least three different papers, compare at least three different versions of the same fact, and come in the end to your own conclusion” (95). Woolf challenges the reader to think critically. Not to look merely at one source and form our opinion. We should have at least three sources about the same topic in front of us. Librarians probably agree; parts of this book could serve as an introduction to Library Science. How many times do I get letters in the mail asking for money? Do I ask myself the reasons behind their requests for money? Do I wonder why they really need the money in the first place? Woolf, I bet, surprises the honorary treasures by questioning their requests. Partly to get them to think about their situations and partly, for Woolf’s part, to answer the real questions.
Why does she attack H.G. Wells? I was surprised to see Wells included in this book; I didn’t think Woolf would go after a particular person in this polemic. But she does. She seems to see him as superficial. Wells obviously does not fight for the same principles as Woolf.
      We are not fighting for the rights of man or for woman. We should be rallying the cause of humanity; because, isn’t it, like Georges Sands says – “all beings are interdependent of one another”? Who of us can present ourselves as insulated, cut off from one another? Because we are a man? Because we are a woman? Most of our problems stem from the insistence on creating sharp distinctions between man/woman; free/slave; public/private. Maybe Woolf is calling for, in this book, is a common interest; “it is one world; one life” (142).
source: Woolf, Virginia,  Three Guineas.  Harcourt Brace. 1938, 1966. 

17.8.10

Gone Flat Land: Why XML Seems Promising

A nerdy post on library science and the future of library cataloging.
image credit: "Tempus Fugit" by abbeyprivate
This essay was written as a requirement for an introduction to cataloging course. An entry like this is not typical stones of erasmus fare, but I post it for all my library and cataloging buddies out there. I warn you, though, I made a C+ in Cataloging. I took the course as an online component. While I like the Reference and Information Services course I took online (which garnered me an A+) I found the Cataloging course online more challenging. My satisfactory grade is most likely attributable to my difficulty keeping up with deadlines, but I also found the assignments hard to conceptualize. Most catalogers use a cataloging application (e.g., Connexion) on a PC to create MARC records or to copy catalog. But, for this class, we had to use a generic MS word document to fill in the fields which I found to be terribly awkward. So, a word from the experienced: if you take an online class in cataloging make sure you have access to a good MARC program.
Anyway, here is my report on XML from a C+ point of view. Enjoy:

16.4.08

Photo Essay: Life Writing Inspired By Familial Images

Organized around a series of photographs taken in Louisiana, Greig Roselli writes a photographic essay evoking themes of home, childhood, desire, and loss.
  1. Landscape
 Figure 1. "Schwinn" 2005
Landscape Shot With Schwinn Bike
I took this particular landscape shot in front of an old slaughterhouse; now it serves as a greenhouse-cum-chicken coop about ¾ miles from the Abbey church where I live. I call this shot a “landscape” using a very simple definition: there are no people. One can have a landscape with people but I think their backs would have to be turned away from the camera, more like mounds than actual people. In this photograph, there is only the sense that “a person has been here” — the already noted bicycle and circular garden hose coiled like a snake and the potted plant point to this. The bicycle sits there as a kind of emblem — or at least that is how I envisioned it when I took this photo — to stand in for someone who was there but has left the frame of the photograph. Maybe there could be a part two for this photo with a figure standing in the place of the bicycle. I show people this photograph and they seem to gravitate toward the bicycle intuiting its connection to an individual person.
True Story (Sorta)
“Whose bicycle, they say?” and I say it was mine and I make up a story about how this was the bicycle I used to ride to work on and my friends would laugh at me because it was a woman’s bicycle. I would shrug it off and say that it made no difference as long as it got me to where I wanted to go. I parked my bike across the street from the restaurant where I worked, behind an air conditioning unit. I used to work at a seafood restaurant and my job was to prepare the crayfish and crabs for boiling. We would pour the creatures, their claws like thousands of pleading arms, into the seasoned water, get the heat going, and once they were boiled, we would serve up portions to the customers. After the shift was over — around midnight or one o’clock — I would drive back home on my bike even though there weren’t any streetlights; I would just pray a “Hail Mary” or just sing really loud to scare away the ghosts. This is a true story; I mix up the details in the telling. It was true that I would ride a bicycle to work, but it was not necessarily the same bicycle in the photograph. The story seemed true enough; it was not as if I were fabricating a story; the bicycle was an emblem for me; the bicycle told many stories. Considering myself a storyteller, I would tell variations of stories from this one photograph, taking elements of different aspects of life and bring it back to the bicycle: for example, my bike was a green Schwinn and it had been stolen one year when I was thirteen and I didn’t get it back until I serendipitously won a brand new bike at the county fair. It never did feel the same; or the time I rode my bike in heavy traffic without glasses; that was a tad bit dangerous; All of this was true, but they were superfluous to the artifact of the photograph of the bike taken above for that particular bike in the picture had no particular emotion for me. It was an old bike lying around the abbey that I had used that day to ride to the greenhouse. I took the picture with the bike in mind, though, and when I developed the photo I scanned it into my computer and applied a kind of matte effect that you might have noticed. I wanted to give the picture a painterly effect. I wanted to squeeze out the realistic parts of the photo — and yes I know this sounds excessively Romantic — but I wanted the picture to stand for something ontological: whether it be innocence or the journey or even experience. I think the Romantics did try to do this in the paintings attributed to Romanticism. But, they did it with Greek mythology. For example, the story of Daphne turned into a tree or a nature scene with dryads and nymphs at a still pool; the scene was too perfect; it was a landscape in a Platonic sense of the word. For, me, perhaps, that is what I was trying to get at in my “bike” photograph and which is why I made so many variations on the story without much moral dilemma. I wanted an image to stand for some kind of eidos that included my experience but somehow rose above self-absorption. For who cares about the story of someone’s bike unless it mimics something about life. The mimetic of the bike suggests the desire for freedom — the stories I told were certainly about freedom or the loss of freedom — so it was kind of a reification of desire I was looking for (which is only a dead desire according to Adorno) — a packaged photo that I could pull out to re-tell the story of an experience (my experience) but in the way of an artist.

5.12.06

Book Review: Warmish-Cool Pleasure in As I Lay Dying


Image result for as i lay dying faulknerWilliam Faulkner’s novel, As I Lay Dying, is the archetypical quest story, one of the most satisfying and basic plots in the literary canon.
The Journey Story
William Faulkner’s novel, As I Lay Dying, is the archetypical quest story, one of the most satisfying and basic plots in the literary canon. Like Homer’s The Odyssey, the pleasure of the quest narrative is in the process of the journey, not necessarily in the final outcome. We read a narrative like As I Lay Dying or The Odyssey to discover pleasure in the journey itself. It's this desire for the journey that makes a story about wandering heroes so appealing. For example, it is not a plot spoiler to find out prematurely that Odysseus slays the suitors and saves his wife and son. In fact, that's not the most exciting part of The Odyssey. It is about the becoming of the hero that is so enthralling. The pleasure of the journey quest is in the process of becoming. As Heraclitus, the Pre-Socratic Greek philosopher wrote, “One cannot step in the same river twice,” so also is As I Lay Dying a journey-process of becoming, albeit a macabre journey of a poor white family in Mississippi to bury their dead mother’s corpse.
The River as Metaphor for Story 
   In this post, I will explore how the madcap journey the Bundren family undertakes becomes, like an ever-changing river, a locus of pleasure in the narrative itself. I will show this using the tableau image of Darl drinking the water-filled gourd because the language and tone of this scene is inebriated with warmish cool water riddled with stars, as Darl describes it himself (8). I will then show how the narrative of the water-filled gourd is depicted as sensuous pleasure, the pleasure of the body and the readerly satisfaction of a wavelike release - in the story's end.
The Bundren Family and Their Motives
   Oddly enough, the disturbing nature of the story is what makes the novel pleasurable. The motives of every Bundren family member cannot be said to be of the highest moral value. Each and every one of the clan has their own motive: Anse, the father, Cash, the eldest, Jewel, Darl, Vardaman, the youngest, and even Addie, the dead mother, all have strange desires and motives. The fact that Cash, in the novel’s opening scene constructs his mother’s coffin, as she lays dying, in a place where she can obviously see and hear him, is sadistic and disturbing. Who would do this to their own mother? After her husband has gone to work and the last “dirty snuffling nose” had gone to school, what kind of mother would go to a quiet place so she “could be quiet and hate them?” (114). But this is the kind of pleasure that Faulkner is gesturing at in this novel. Cash derives pleasure from constructing the coffin, as is shown in a chapter that lists deliciously how he made the coffin on the bevel (53).  His reason?  “The animal magnetism of a dead body makes the stress come slanting, so the seams and joints of a coffin are made on a bevel” (53).
    This pleasure is what makes one reader say, “this book is so funny” and another reader to say, “this book is so sick!”   There is a voyeurism ingrained in the reader to want to find out more about this strange, poor family and what compels them to undertake their journey no matter how much you feel or think their journey is depraved.  The reader is interested in as many details as can be garnered that can aid in putting the narrative pieces together to understand the journey arc of the novel.  This is highly pleasurable.  Added to this is the structure of the novel itself.  It is told by a series of monologues written in a stream of consciousness style.  The reader puts together the pieces of the Bundren’s journey through the varied and limited mental states of the characters.  Being inside of the mind of a character provides pleasure, for it is a romp within the mental imagery of another “person”.    
Darl as the Central Character
    The character of Darl comprises many of the scenes in the book.  We are inside Darl’s mind, it seems, more than any other character.  Darl seems to be a logical character, but one notices that he takes too many “soft right angles.” There is something sinister in his immediacy with the world around him. Darl emphasizes an unmediated relationship to the world.  His conception of the world is dictated solely by sensuosity.  Although this will prove to be his demise into insanity, he finds pleasure in what he apprehends to be intuitively sensuous and tangible.  He is not interested as much in the concern and care for other human beings as long as they fit into his own sensuous relationship to reality.  For example, the scene with the water-filled gourd warrants how Darl’s sensuous response to things around him becomes a fixated locus of pleasure in the narrative arc of the story’s journey.
The Water-Filled Gourd
    Around the side of the house, the Bundrens have set a cedar bucket to allow water to sit.  It gives the water a sweet taste.  As the father Anse points out, water tastes sweetest when it has sat in a cedar bucket for at least six hours, not in metal.  It’s “warmish-cool, with a faint taste like the hot July wind in cedar trees smells" (8).  Once the water has sat for a time, it is poured into a gourd.   
    What enhances the pleasure for the reader in this scene is how Faulkner situates the text within the narrative structure of the chapter.  We are inside Darl’s troubled head here. But we hear his father ask him, “Where’s Jewel?” (8). It is in the interstices of this question that Darl fantasizes about going to the water-filled gourd at night, stirred awake, to see the stars in the water inside the gourd, to be intoxicated into an erotic reverie.  But the text reverts back to reality.  Back to the scene where his father had asked him about Jewel’s whereabouts. The text brings us in and out of internal journeys into external journeys and out again and back again. This is what gives the novel a heightened sense of journey for the reader.  The pleasure of the text is not only Darl’s own bodily pleasure, but the text itself becomes an erogenous zone. The text is a sensuous locus of pleasure as well as the pleasure of the character Darl himself, despite Darl’s own descent into madness.